author

Robert Lee Durham

1870–1949

An engineer, educator, and novelist of the New South, this early-20th-century writer brought public issues of his day into fiction. He is best remembered for "The Call of the South," a controversial novel that blended melodrama with debate over race, society, and regional identity.

1 Audiobook

The Call of the South

The Call of the South

by Robert Lee Durham

About the author

Born in Shelby, North Carolina, in 1870, Robert Lee Durham built an unusually varied career as an engineer, teacher, school leader, and author. He studied at Trinity College and later became the founding principal and president of Southern Seminary Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia.

Durham also wrote fiction, and his best-known novel is The Call of the South (1908). The book was presented at the time as a major novel about the race question, and it reflects the tensions and assumptions of the era in which it was written.

He died in 1949. Today, Durham is of interest not only as a novelist, but also as a figure whose life connects Southern education, public life, and the cultural debates of the early twentieth century.